Though the new Halloween is still a couple of weeks away from hitting cinemas, the strong critical response received by David Gordon Green’s slasher sequel surely bodes well for its release, and if all goes well at the box office then a follow-up film seems inevitable.
Last month, the movie’s co-writer Danny McBride went on record saying that he was mulling over ideas for potential sequels, and once more, the scribe is looking to the franchise’s future with cautious optimism.
“David and I definitely had some ideas at the beginning of this of what we would do if there was an appetite for it. We have some ideas, so now we’re just sort of exploring them to see if they have enough legs to kind of warrant it. I know that Jason Blum (Halloween producer and founder of Blumhouse productions), I bet you he’d be stoked to make some more. [But] I think he’s been on the same mindset we’ve been of, Let’s just wait and see what people think.”
Producer Jason Blum has already expressed his interest in getting a sequel made, though again, he felt this plan was contingent on the commercial success of this latest Halloween. As for what a sequel could entail, it’s hard to say, since this long-running franchise has already taken the murderous Michael Myers through a lot of strange and unexpected territory, from sinister cults to reality TV shows.
Of course, most of these events are no longer canon to the series, since this new Halloween disregards every prior installment from the timeline save for the 1978 original. This essentially means that McBride and his colleagues practically have a clean slate for where the saga could go from here, and it’s doubtful that they’d offer a mere retread of the sibling twist from Halloween II.
Speaking of which, here’s hoping that the Blumhouse team think of a more creative way of naming the sequel than simply adding a ‘II’ on the end. Having three films in this series that are simply called Halloween is confusing enough. We don’t need a third Halloween II as well.
In any case, whether we get any sequel at all will depend on how well the new Halloween fares at the box office, but so far, things are looking promising for the film’s release on October 19th.